Birds eating plastic—that was not news to me. But I hadn’t heard about whales unwittingly consuming plastic while feeding, as indicated by this article on Real News 24. It makes sense. If the...
In mid-September, the northern Front Range of Colorado (the eastern side of the Rocky Mountains) received more rain than it does in a year. The week of September 9, rain fell continuously for about...
Here are a couple of interesting posts from the Chemicals and Nanomaterials blog written by Environmental Defense Fund. The first one I’m linking to here describes the process the European...
Bees, bats, birds, and amphibians have been experiencing declines worldwide since the mid-1990s, but the problem has become truly terrible since the early 2000s. Researchers have noticed these...
On Saturday I hiked up Spruce Gulch, off Left Hand Canyon Road in Boulder, to see the weed research and eradication projects being conducted there. Tim Seastedt, a professor of ecology and...
California nonprofit 5 Gyres Institute will conduct a study of the plastic pollution in the South Pacific Gyre, sailing a boat from Valdivia, Chile, to Easter Island. The group has already sailed...
The main thing that concerns me about the United States right now is its political and military culture, how we seem to be pressing full steam ahead with what I think are dangerous projects (DP). The...
Obama has ordered CIA employees to kill many more suspected terrorists using drones than Bush ever did. Bush ordered about 42 drone strikes; Obama has ordered at least 180. Why? Because they’re...
On January 27, 2011, the US Department of Agriculture pretty much gave a green light for Monsanto to sell seeds for its genetically engineered alfalfa and sugar beets. (Monsanta has been selling...
Just spent 15 minutes or so dealing with recycling. No, it doesn’t take me that long to find the recycling bin. I had to rinse out a small plastic bag so that I could recycle it; plastic bags...
I heard of Rodale’s Plastic-Free Challenge on the blog My Plastic Free Life. Like Zero Waste, Plastic-Free is an aspiration, not a reality. For example, I posted something on Facebook about the...
Did you know there are about 4,000 oil and natural gas drilling platforms in the Gulf of Mexico? And that those platforms service nearly 6,000 active wells? It’s amazing that a spill like...
Two Denver-area women, Stephanie Peller of Broomfield and former Broomfield resident Tais Field, plan to climb Kilimanjaro to help raise money for the A21 Campaign (“abolishing injustice in the...
This post was updated in May 2011. Niwot, Colorado, beekeeper Tom Theobald has been concerned about the effects of pesticides on honeybee populations for some time, and that concern motivated him to...
Yes! magazine’s summer 2010 issue focused on water, and my favorite article therein described the ongoing restoration of the Feather River watershed in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California...
How could that be? As Charles Redell points out in the Sustainable Industries blog, not everything we consume is stuff. Much of the time we feed on experiences. So if you’re in despair (or even...
Most people probably don’t think that one environmental good can be used to greenwash in another area. But just that may be happening in a conflict between the 1987 Montreal Protocol (designed...
Colony collapse disorder (CCD) has been noted in beehives worldwide since 2006. In this disorder, the bees don’t simply die and fall out of the hives onto the ground. The entire colony...
I know plastic travels that far because the trash exhibit I saw in 2004 at the Centro Ecologico Sian Ka’an (CESIAK) includes some plastic from Poland that had washed up on the beach in Mexico...
There’s no getting around it: The Dirt is a great blog. I could spend all day reading it and learning about new contests and restoration projects. Here are the posts I selected from about 20...
Gentle reader, you may have been scratching your head over that headline. I mean that water is becoming as hot a topic as green energy and oil spills and energy use and all that stuff. And I say...
This story from Cultural Survival magazine’s spring 2010 issue makes me so sad. An American company, AES, has been given permission by the government of Panama to build a hydroelectric dam on...
Through the federal Landowner Incentive Program, New York has expanded a program to get private landowners to protect habitat for certain species. The new beneficiary? Bog turtles, a small, chestnut...
The top kill didn’t work. There are other options, none of them good. British Petroleum can put a new platform on top of the riser and try to get most of the oil into ships. It could build a...
“Problems That Require Restoration” is the understatement of … this century? Here’s a picture of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill with a few boats trying to contain it (photo...